JABBO'S PROFILE

Okay we all know about those community stories where each person posts the next part of the story. This is like that, except the story starts at the end and goes backwards.

Rule (There's only one)
The end of your post must transition into the beginning of the previous poster's.

Good
Post n: David glanced down; the robot's severed head lay on the ground, sparking eloquently. He shuddered in silence.
Post n+1: She swung the crowbar into the back of the robot's head, a shatter of sparks raining upon the concrete. "Are you okay?" she inquired.

Bad
Post n: David glanced down; the robot's severed head lay on the ground, sparking eloquently. He shuddered in silence.
Post n+1: Jesus flew down from heaven and removed chinchillas from the world.


Post length and writing style don't matter, so you don't have to write much if you don't want to. Trying to screw with the next poster is acceptable and encouraged. Dialogue must work properly. If your post fails to follow the rule, then the next poster should ignore it and proceed normally (just say so).

Don't worry about proper storytelling, because this whole thing would be really lame if we hit the climax immediately and then have to go downhill from there (or maybe not! We'll see). Do at least try to make the story make sense, though. We'll see how long it can go on before everything goes to hell.


The name of the story is Timetwister. Please participate, and good luck!




They stood at the edge of the cape, looking out over the water. The setting sun was reflected in the bay, glistening with a million tiny sparkles. The meteors were falling again; they shimmered in the soft glow of the setting sun.

"This whole ordeal would have been a lot easier if we had only known what the meteors meant from the very beginning. Looking at them now, they're almost beautiful," said Vanessa, enchanted.

"Next time something like this happens, we won't be so naive. We'll be ready," said David.

"But there won't be a next time," Vanessa sighed.

He smiled. "No," he said. "If only we knew."

They were silent for a moment, watching the sunset play out before them in a display of brilliant color. The meteors signaled the sun's last refrain, never to rise again.

"To the end of time?" asked David, looking into her eyes.

"To the end of time."

They drew close, locked in embrace as the last of the meteors fell to earth.

I don't really know where to put this, so...

I played Jay's Journey a long time ago, and I liked a couple of the songs he had in there. But then later I finally played Earthbound (Winters music) and Terranigma (Crysta) and learned where he got those songs. But there's one song I've never encountered anywhere else, and would like to know what it is:

www.geocities.com/jabbo999/Fortitude.mid

Okay, this is something that's plagued me for awhile now, but HP and Defense are essentially the same stat. Yes, there are plenty of subtle differences, but when it comes right down to it, gaining a point in HP and gaining a point in Def serve the exact same purpose: you live longer before you die.

Now, okay, you might say something like "What about a low HP, high Def monster?" Well, how is it any different from a high HP, low Def monster? It still takes just as long to kill, and what its actual health number is doesn't matter. You might also say that HP is for both physical and magical resistance, and Def is only physical. But that's just complicating the issue. Because you're going to have some sort of magic resistance stat, too, and then why give a few points in HP rather than just one point in Def and Res? Or you might say that low HP, high Def benefits more from heal spells, but that's a really weak argument.

Quite frankly, what it comes down to is that HP is the weaker stat, and it's much better to have high Def/Res and low HP than it is to have high HP and low Def/Res. All this depends on balance, of course (it would be really easy to make HP worth more than Def/Res, just edit the formulas).

The standard solution is to simply make HP AND Def/Res increase every level and be done with it. Your tanks get high HP and high Def, your mages get low HP and low Def, and you'll have like a berserker with high HP and low Def (and honestly that just equates to medium HP, medium Def). So why bother with HP at all?

I can only come up with a few reasons:

One, in collection-based games where leveling up isn't as important as finding cool stuff, HP and Def can have different methods of going up, which adds a cool feeling to the game and gives you more to collect. Like you collect HP stones to get HP and get Def when you level up, or get HP on levels but have to find new armor for Def.

Two, Fire Emblem. FE has the lovely weapon triangle which is actually pretty deeply tied to stats. Swords are weak, fast, and high critical, which works perfectly against the high HP, low Def axes; they can deal a lot of damage since they don't have to deal with enemy Def (and critical x3 damage is very effective). Whereas axes are high attack power, low hit rate, which works great against the defensive spear units, since their attack power can overcome the high defense and their low hit rates don't matter because the spears are just that slow. And then spears are awesome against swords because swords can't break their defense, and swords don't have enough HP to deal with getting hit by a spear. The point here is that axes get HP and spears get Def, and because of the Att - Def damage system, they work fundamentally differently.

Three, Att - Def damage systems. This ties into the above, but if you think of a game like Paper Mario, a point in Def is pretty much an entirely different animal from a point in HP. But in Paper Mario, you never actually leveled up Defense directly, which I guess goes back to the first point.


I've toyed with the idea of just making HP constant throughout the game (Max HP = 100), and only using a Def stat. Is there any good reason not to do this?

And another point, when speed's primary purpose is to determine how often you can attack, how is it any different from Att or Mag? I mean, yeah, having them both in good balance will equate to maximum damage, but why should a game designer force the player to work with that? When they want to deal more damage, they're going to put points in whatever they think will help them do that best. Why give them two options that lead to the same result? I guess this is a more intricate issue, because light, fast characters feel like they play differently from huge, clunky powerhouses. Honestly, though, it's all the same.

Just wondering if anyone else has thought about this.